Hash chains at the basis of a secure reactive routing protocol

Abstract

Presently, the main concern of ad hoc routing protocols is no longer to find an optimal route to a given destination but to find the safe route free from malicious attackers. Several secure ad hoc routing protocols proposed, in the literature, are based on public key cryptography which drawback is to consume much more resources and decrease consequently network performances. In this paper, we propose a secure routing scheme for the DSR protocol. The proposed scheme combines the hash chains and digital signatures to provide a high level of security while reducing the costs of hop-by-hop signature generation and verification. The proposed protocol is analyzed using the NS-2 simulator. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.